4 Reasons Why Website Migrations Fail & How to Control Them

There are "4 Reasons Why Website Migrations Fail & How to Control Them"

1. Poor Planning

Successful website migrations are planned well and executed with military precision.

Planning starts as early as possible, ideally when the idea of migrating the website is first entertained.

You’re going to need all the time you can get to:

Scope the migration and put together an action plan and a website migration team.
Educate them on website migrations (more on that later).
Request a budget.
Prepare migration checklists, redirect plans, and so on.

Scoping the website migration and identifying the goals for the migration is really important too, because otherwise how are you going to evaluate how it went?

One of the most common problems happening in website migrations is SEO professionals getting involved in the process way too late. When that happens, pull the handbrake.

Your odds of making the website migration a success aren’t looking good; if you don’t take the time to properly plan the migration, you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

Make sure that you, and perhaps a few of your colleagues who are part of the core website migration team, have the final say in whether you decide to proceed with the migration, or instead postpone it because you need more time.

Choosing to move ahead with the migration should not be an executive decision.


2. A Decrease of Awareness of the Risks Involved in Website Migrations.

It’s essential that everyone involved in the website migration is acutely aware of the risks involved.

In SEO, there are no guarantees. If you rock the boat with a migration, there’s always a chance things will go wrong and you won’t regain your old rankings.

Search engines don’t owe you anything – not even an explanation.

Address this by holding a training session wherein you explain the website migration’s risks to everyone involved. Make it visual and bring the inherent risks to life by presenting website migration case studies.

Include visibility charts, and show them the good, the bad, and the ugly. And then some more ugly to make sure your message is received.

I say “involve everyone,” but who’s that? Consider people in the following roles (but potentially also others):

SEO team

Copywriters

Front-end and back-end developers

DevOps

Project managers

Legal

Managemen

3. A Decrease of Knowledge by the Parties Involve

So now that you’ve ensured everyone involved is aware of the risks, schedule SEO training sessions for everyone who’s going to be directly involved in the website migration.

Explain the basics of SEO and highlight particular aspects that are especially important when it comes to website migrations, such as:

301 redirects.
Properly setting up separate test environments.
The impact of changing content.
Website migrations that went sour should definitely be included in these training sessions, including charts showing the drop in visibility.

Schedule a separate, more high-level, training session for the decision makers involved.


They don’t need to hear about the nuts and bolts of website migrations, but they do need to know:

What risks are involved.
What they can expect.
What you need from them to be able to successfully pull off the website migration.


4. A Weak Migration Checklist

Even if you’ve planned and educated everyone on the risks involved in website migrations well, you can still fail at them horribly.

You may have a weak migration checklist.

Essential checks may be missing, or your checklist may be insufficiently thorough.

Your migration checklist needs to contain both pre-launch and post-launch checks.

Plan enough time to draft a complete and thorough migration checklist.

Things to pay special attention to are:

1Content:

 Is it all in place, and if it’s different from the old site, is it as expected? This goes beyond body content, as it also includes meta information such as titles and meta descriptions. It can even go as far as schema, Open Graph, and Twitter Cards markup.

2.Redirect plan:

Are URLs mapped correctly? And are the redirects implemented and working correctly?

3. Technical checks:

Among others, these are checks to ensure that your robots.txt, robots directives, canonical URLs, hreflang attributes, XML sitemaps, and page speed are all correctly set up.